E-Mail This Article to a Friend Apocalypse whatever Doom brightens the spring releases BY PETER KEOUGH

Rumor has it that the current administration is looking forward to the end of the world. That might explain why it has no qualms about despoiling the environment, invoking Armageddon in its foreign policy, or bankrupting the economy with its tax cuts and deficits. Hollywood also is no slouch when it comes to doomsday, and this spring, it seems to have captured the national mood with digitally spectacular cataclysms from the past, present, and future.

The doom-laden scenarios range from a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah to a mediæval crusade, from an interplanetary invasion to an interstellar conflicts, from domestic chaos to international crisis. Biblical retribution, worldwide plague, political assassination, diabolical in-laws, and traumatic sporting events — the next two months promise the cinematic equivalent of the Last Judgment. Let’s hope we’re spared the real-life version long enough to enjoy it.

Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi, Spy Kids) may not end the world, but he hopes to revolutionize a certain kind of filmmaking with Sin City (April 1), his adaptation of the Frank Miller graphic novels. Re-creating the comic books frame by frame, he’s aiming to add a mythical element to the sordid intrigues taking place in the fictitious city of the title. Abetting him is a first-rate cast of sinners including Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Brittany Murphy, and Josh Hartnett.

Less mythic but perhaps equally sordid is Rebecca Miller’s The Ballad of Jack and Rose (April 1) in which Miller’s husband, Daniel Day Lewis, plays a washed-up environmentalist who faces an impending personal Götterdämmerung. He looks on helplessly as his sexually awakened teenage daughter, his live-in girlfriend, a rapacious landowner, and other interlopers on his island hideaway converge in a messy confrontation.

As local sports fans know, any event, however apocalyptic, pales before last year’s World Series victory. Perhaps they’ll be satisfied with Fever Pitch (April 8), the Farrelly Brothers’ loose adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel. In this version, which the Farrellys shot last season at Fenway Park and other local venues, Jimmy Fallon plays a Red Sox fan whose obsession gets in the way of his relationship with girlfriend Drew Barrymore. Like the season, the film ends triumphantly.

Another fever, deadlier but equally light-hearted, spreads through Africa in Sahara (April 8). Penélope Cruz plays a doctor investigating a mysterious African plague whose path crosses that of a Indiana Jones–like treasure hunter Matthew McConaughey in this adaptation of the Clive Cussler bestseller. Disney mogul Michael Eisner’s son Breck (Thoughtcrimes) directs.

As disastrous as the death of thousands by plague is the potential murder of one man in Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter (April 22). Title character Nicole Kidman overhears an assassination plot, so FBI agent Sean Penn has to protect her in this first film shot inside the United Nations.

There’s another murder conspiracy in XXX State of the Union (April 29), a sequel to the 2002 hit with Ice Cube in the Vin Diesel role as a street punk enlisted by a secret agency to foil a plot to overthrow the government. Samuel Jackson and Willem Dafoe co-star; Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, Die Another Day) directs.

But the end of life as we know it is just the beginning of the fun in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (May 6), as the millions of cult fans of the Douglas Adams tongue-in-cheek SF novel will tell you. An alien construction crew wipes out the earth in a gentrification project. One person survives, saved by the author of the title volume, who needs him for research purposes. First-time director Garth Jennings (actor in Shaun of the Dead) leads an impressive cast that includes Martin Freeman, Mos Def, Sam Rockwell, and Zooey Deschanel.

Given recent events, you could well experience déjà vu while watching Kingdom of Heaven (May 6) as Ridley Scott (Gladiator) trains his epic eye on the Crusades, with Orlando Bloom as a plucky 12th-century Westerner living in Jerusalem who "rises to knighthood" and finds himself caught in a battle over the Holy City. I suspect things won’t go as smoothly as when Bloom took on the evildoers in The Lord of the Rings. Liam Neeson, Eva Green, and Jeremy Irons also star.

Catastrophic as the Crusades might have been, they can’t compare to some of the disasters Jennifer Lopez has brought to the screen. Adding to the potential tragedy of her new Monster in Law (May 13) is Jane Fonda’s first return to the movies in 15 years, as the title termagant who tries to undermine J-Lo’s romance with her beloved son. Robert Luketic (Legally Blonde) directs.

Spring comes to an official close with the return of consummate Armageddon franchise, George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (May 19). With the last two episodes disappointing even hardcore fanboys, the stakes are high for this new installment to restore the series to form. Not that that will make any difference; the film will still make half a billion bucks, unless we’re all blown to kingdom come beforehand.